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Al Gore Moves Beyond Meta

Any organization reflects its leader, as Al Gore says, and for most of last year his presidential campaign was the outward sign of an inward turmoil. At the beginning of 1999, he was certain to stroll to the Democratic nomination. Who would have predicted that, before the year was out, he would change campaign managers and chiefs of staff, replace his pollsters and his admen, truck his headquarters from Washington to Nashville and begin the year 2000 worried he would have less cash on hand after the New Hampshire primary than Bill Bradley, the challenger he once dismissed? Though born and bred for higher office and schooled by Bill Clinton for seven years in the getting and holding of the presidency, Gore was unprepared to run for the job to a degree baffling to some of his advisers. This past year -- particularly the past four months -- has provided a bracing political education for a man who had no clue how much he needed it.

''It's sort of like the experience that most of us have in getting older,'' the vice president told me during a rare appearance in his West Wing office, a few days before Christmas. ''You look back at a previous point in your life and find it difficult to believe how little you knew. I look back now at the beginning of the year, while the impeachment trial was about to begin and incoming rounds were landing on the White House roof every 30 seconds, and I can't believe that I decided to put the campaign on K Street.'' He roared with laughter. ''You know, hello?''

That Gore is still talking in detail about that education is evidence that it remains under way. The early, very public incompetence of his campaign created a political problem that he is still struggling to solve; it lent weight to Democrats' central concern about him, that he lacked the political wherewithal to beat an impressive Republican candidate. To combat the relentlessly negative reviews of his campaign, Gore has been forced to make the quality of his campaigning central to his candidacy, to ballyhoo the move of his headquarters to Nashville, for example, while Bradley kept on talking about health care or child poverty and his advisers remained silently behind their curtains. This has repeatedly returned Gore to the same shaky ground -- his political ability -- while lending heft to a related doubt about him: that he is a programmable man guided more by tactics than beliefs. Gore's problem, in short, has been less alpha or beta than meta.

It's a peculiar problem, for what Gore has been learning this past year is how to be a politician -- which is, of course, the job description of a candidate. Unfortunately for Gore, however, it is a dirty word.

But what is so wicked about a politician politicking? This year, candidates and reporters are condemning politics and praising ''authenticity.'' Antipolitics has been with us for some time now; authenticity is this campaign's variant, a kind of characterological shorthand for everything politics allegedly is not -- honest, deep, real. But those who tout authenticity are making an almost useless distinction, at least as far as campaigning goes. If authenticity is what the people want (and, help me here, when was it that they clamored for fakery?), then it is a political act to give it to them. Was it ''authentic'' for Bradley as a senator to study Elvis Presley movies in hopes of honing his communication skills? He was looking to change himself to appeal to people, the essence of inauthenticity. On the other hand, he was hoping to appeal to people in order to lead them, the essence of good politics.

The phony divide between authenticity and politicking was captured by the tumult earlier this month over John McCain's letters pressuring the F.C.C. to speed up a decision important to a donor. Captain Campaign Reform suddenly looked like just another politician. Yes, by all means take the excessive money out of politics; but don't take the politics out, to paraphrase Clinton. In policing the bureaucracy on behalf of his constituents, including donors, McCain was being who he is, an authentic politician. Put another way, he was doing his job.

Gore's chief problem is that deep down he suspects it is dishonorable to be a politician, and this can make him a bad one. He reminds me a bit of some second-generation auto dealers, the expensively educated sons of self-made men who balk at the tactics of the family business they know so intimately. ''He doesn't really like politics,'' one of Gore's closest aides told me. ''He holds it in disdain.'' But he is gradually coming to terms with his outer politician. As with the move to Nashville, campaign gestures that were entirely political -- gestures that Gore feared would be derided as entirely political -- have had political effects that have reminded him what is so great about politics: it connects candidates with voters.

This was illustrated by his challenge to Bradley that they forego political advertising and hold plenty of debates instead. Pundits immediately dismissed the proposal as a political gimmick. They were right that it was a gimmick. They were wrong to dismiss it. Gore was led, by political considerations, to suggest a reform that would have elevated the discussion and released some of the money pressure. His offer left Bradley in the position of defending 30-second commercials as a more effective means of communication. Which is the more cynical -- or if you prefer, ''political'' -- position? Who cares?

As a politician, Gore is making progress. Man, message and political machine mesh more smoothly now than four months ago. The changes in each did not come at once, but they occurred over roughly the same time -- just before and after Gore shifted his headquarters to Nashville in October -- and they reinforced one another. A new team of loyal advisers, his own competitive nature and a rediscovery of his competence at face-to-face politicking have probably given him enough confidence and focus to win the Democratic nomination, barring any egregious blunders. He has solidified his position in Iowa and strengthened it in New York, which may force Bradley to divert time and money from the West and the South to what had once looked like a sure state for him.

Yet doubts about politics are still getting in his way. Like Clinton, Gore is ruthless -- a quality operatives who know him cite with respect -- and he will do what he thinks it takes to win. But he is not as consistently right about what the ''it'' is, because, unlike Clinton, he does not have much respect for the muddle of personality and policy that is presidential campaigning. And that causes him, sometimes, to disrespect his audience, to act as if it must be led by the nose, for who but the dim would take this circus seriously? Hence his stagy offer of a handshake to Bradley when he proposed shunning political ads, a contrived -- O.K., ''inauthentic'' -- gesture that undercut his words.

The focus on Gore's politicking might seem to overlook the question of how good a president, as opposed to a candidate, he would be -- to sell short his policy expertise, for example, which is unmatched in the Democratic or Republican field. But the questions are not separable, as Gore himself acknowledges. ''I think that the way a candidate for president communicates with the voters is directly relevant to the way a president communicates with the American people after the election,'' he told me.

Of course, it is about listening as well as talking. Gore learned this when his father drifted out of touch with his constituents -- undermining his ability to reconcile them to his antiwar position -- and lost his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1970. He seemed for most of last year to have forgotten that. But he has been learning again to pay attention, as he did when he was in Congress, to listen to voters and to answer their questions. Before small groups this fall and winter, Gore has displayed a mastery of intricate matters, a knack for explaining them and an agile sense of humor. He has also become a better debater, finally swallowing his aggravation with Clinton and expressing some pride in the work they did in what Bradley derided as a Washington ''bunker.'' Gore's comeback to Bradley's ''bunker'' remark was canned, and his own advisers wished he had been quick-witted enough to generate it when Bradley first attacked. But at last he managed to take credit for Clinton administration policies without embracing, or trashing, Clinton the man.

Gore has been relearning what it is to seek votes for himself, and in this quest he has been aided not by soul-searching but by pros who never lose sleep about whether some tactic is too political. One day this fall, mid-turnaround, Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign manager, sketched a triangle for me on a sheet of paper in her cubbyhole of an office in Nashville. Along one edge she wrote the words ''proven leader'' and along the next she wrote ''principled fighter.'' By the third she wrote ''experience that matters.''

To make sure that the American people got the right message about her complicated boss, Brazile and other campaign staff members were struggling at the time to fit their thoughts about him into that shape, which was designed by Carter Eskew, Gore's message guru and the most influential man in his campaign. ''Every conversation -- no matter how it starts off -- it's got to go into this box,'' Brazile explained. ''Whether it's Social Security, health care, education -- O.K.?'' Then, beside the triangle, she sketched a square. She attached the same labels to three of the sides, and along the fourth she added the words ''substantive differences with Bill Bradley.'' This is not about geometry. It is entirely about politics.

Above the conference table, Michael Whouley, whip thin and balding, was all gravelly voice and fiercely focused gaze, but beneath it he was all motion. He perched on the edge of his seat, the balls of his feet against the floor and his knees punching the air or waggling together and apart. He rubbed his hands together, then systematically cracked each knuckle.

Arrayed before him, with varying degrees of wariness, were the top 15 staff members of Gore's campaign in Iowa. Around them, taped to the walls of Gore's Des Moines headquarters, were sheets of white construction paper bearing the lyrical names of Iowa's counties -- Wapello, Dallas, Jasper -- with the percentage of Democratic delegates that will come from each, the number of voters committed to Gore and the number that he needs to win. Whouley was there to make sure that those last two numbers matched by Jan. 24, when Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses are to be held.

''Nothing -- less -- than -- that -- is -- acceptable,'' he said, hands above the table and pressed prayerfully together now, their heels rapping it at each word.

There is something of a class divide between American political operatives. There are the high-flying media advisers who expensively conduct the war from the air and draw reporters' attention, and then there are the organizers in jeans and flannel shirts who fight it out on the ground, in every precinct. Whouley, a Bostonian whose thick Dorchester accent renders him an ''organizuh,'' is, along with Donna Brazile, one of the Democrats' most experienced in the second category, which is the reason Gore turned to him when his campaign stumbled. Whouley, who is 40, took charge of the campaign in New Hampshire and Iowa after Gore got a wake-up call from The Boston Globe. On Sept. 5, it published a survey showing him and Bradley in a statistical tie in New Hampshire. Some Gore advisers date the campaign's turnaround to that poll. Confident that Bush and not Bradley was the problem, the campaign had not polled in New Hampshire since July.

At a meeting with Gore's supporters in New Hampshire, Whouley got an earful. Set off by rope lines, Secret Service agents and lecterns, Gore was running the sort of imperial campaign that repelled the state's cosseted voters. The headquarters in Washington and the vice president's office did not listen to suggestions from the field. It took conference call after conference call to schedule the most basic of events, and then even more wrangling to vet the list of invitees and choose the backdrop.

In Iowa, the situation was less severe. Gore had done more retail politicking there, in part because an aggressive campaign team on the ground had won some of its screaming matches with the vice-presidential staff. But Gore worried that the campaign might not be building the precinct-by-precinct organization needed to corral voters for the evening-long caucuses, which are to take place tomorrow. In each of the 2,142 precincts, the campaign needed a volunteer captain able to drag other supporters in.

Anticipating a Bradley push into Iowa, Gore's top aides feared that he could narrow the gap enough to outperform reporters' expectations, or even win. Whouley found that the campaign was not ready to beat him back. One exhausted staff member was carrying the burden of overseeing the caucuses in all 99 counties.

When he reported to the vice president, Whouley recommended that he begin holding town-hall meetings with undecided voters in New Hampshire. He also requested a reorganization of the Iowa campaign structure.

Iowa was divided into six regions, each overseen by a new regional director. Now, in mid-December, Whouley had come to grill the directors on their progress and to find out how much money they needed from headquarters; no new field office, he insisted, should cost more than $100 a month. Above all, he wanted to make sure they were aware of the stakes. He told them that each held ''Al Gore's political viability'' in his hands.

If Gore stumbles in Iowa, his failure will surely be attributed to his personal appeal or his advertising. In fact, his success or failure will turn on this detail work invisible at the national level. It may be gritty politics, but it is also the side of campaigning that engages hundreds of young people and volunteers. Should the campaign rent 100 sport utility vehicles to drive people to the caucuses in case it snows? (''Bradley's demographic is suburban, and they drive Volvos,'' Whouley warned. ''The new Volvos have four-wheel drive.'') How many phone lines, at $40 a pop, must a new field office have to conduct 400 calls a night? Where should they send the volunteers who would pour into Iowa right before the caucuses? Should Gore himself place a call to a particular teetering county supervisor? What should be done about the two organizers in eastern Iowa discovered eating Cheerios during telephone time? ''Can we fire these people?'' inquired Whouley, with sudden, icy fury. ''Why does this region have so many [expletive] knuckleheads?''

Whouley's message in Des Moines reflected Brazile's top priorities since Gore elevated her from political director to campaign manager: cutting spending and instilling some passion in the staff.

One of nine children from Kenner, La., Brazile likes to keep her expenses low enough that she could survive, if she had to, working a double shift at McDonald's. She believes paid consultants are somehow antidemocratic. She spends her vacations organizing for congressional candidates. And so she was deeply uncomfortable with the colorless, spiritless campaign Gore was running from K Street, Washington's Lobbyists' Row, where the headquarters was spread across three floors. Bill Bradley had more of a cult than a campaign, she thought, while sometimes the Gore operation felt like a travel agency.

Those problems had bothered Gore for months. In early May, he brought in Coelho in hopes of disciplining his operation. That was a gamble, since Coelho, a Californian who had risen to majority whip largely on the strength of his prodigious fund-raising, had left Congress under a cloud 10 years ago, and risked further marking Gore as the insiders' candidate. Gore and Coelho were friendly in the House, but they had never been close. But Gore realized that he needed someone toughened by bare-knuckle Democratic politics, someone with ''gray hair.'' In their private conversations, Gore assured Coelho that if he ran a good campaign, the smudges of his past would take care of themselves.

Gore likes to run his offices on what one former aide described as a hub-and-spoke model, with himself as the hub. In the early days of the campaign, Gore had several competing power centers: his campaign headquarters, his consultants, his vice-presidential office, and his kitchen cabinet, which includes his wife, Tipper; his brother-in-law, Frank Hunger, and his daughter Karenna. Coelho, who is working without salary, established a chain of command on a corporate model, with himself functioning as the chief executive officer under the chairman, Gore.

In June, Gore had asked Coelho how much it would cost to move the campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville. Coelho looked into breaking the K Street lease, which was due to last into 2001, but found there was no way to do it. Like other advisers Gore consulted, Coelho worried that moving the headquarters would be derided by the press as a gimmick. ''Before he did it, it was easy to see all the negatives,'' Karenna Gore Schiff recalled.

By late September, though, Gore was desperate. His fund-raising was lagging, and the quarterly financial report, due at the end of the month, would show that Bradley had raised more than he in the previous three months. He decided the campaign never would get off the ground if it stayed in Washington. Gore opened his Nashville headquarters in a former rehabilitation center beside some railroad tracks on Oct. 6. (He is still paying $60,000 a month for empty offices on K Street.)

The same day, he promoted Brazile, who began an examination of what she called ''Goreworld,'' the results of which revolted her. Consultants were getting paid as much as $15,000 monthly; paid advisers were rendering opinions on what kind of paper the headquarters should use.

Although fund-raising has been tougher than the campaign expected since Bradley tapped into his potential donors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, Gore is closing in on the amount he is allowed to spend in the primaries, about $33 million. But Bradley, who has raised almost as much, was able to spend more this winter on advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire because Gore wasted so much in the first nine months of the year. During that period, Gore reported spending nearly two times as much on office rent as Bradley, more than twice as much on office supplies and about 12 times as much on parking. Brazile starting chopping salaries, which were both an enormous expense and a hallmark of the corporate culture she wanted to kill. She then set her sights on perks.

Shortly after her promotion, Brazile was a little too frank about her vision for Gore's support. In an interview with The Washington Post, she said that the ''four pillars'' of the Democratic Party were women, blacks, organized labor and ethnic minorities and that its ''emerging constituencies'' were the disabled, environmentalists and gay men and lesbians. This unnerved the moderates over at the Democratic Leadership Council, who feared that eight years of Clintonian sidling to the middle could vanish in a panicked leftward lurch by Gore.

The incident inflamed concerns, at least outside the campaign, about Brazile. In 1988, she had been forced to resign from the Dukakis campaign after what her colleagues there considered a bizarre episode, in which she suggested that reporters check out rumors about Vice President George Bush's marital life. As far back as April, Brazile had privately assured Gore that she had learned from the experience and that she would never embarrass him. As campaign manager, she has been careful to say that Carter Eskew is in charge of the message, and she has been intently studying what he says. ''See, they're teaching me to talk message, which is what I want to learn anyway,'' she told me. ''I want to stop talking about it as African-Americans, women, labor, bladdy bladdy bladdy blah.'' But she slipped again earlier this month when she mocked black Republicans for being tokens of a party that cares little about minorities, managing to offend Colin Powell. Her statements once more yanked attention away from her candidate and centered it on his campaign.

Brazile's mistake was in talking about what she was doing, rather than just doing it. Regardless of the message she is learning, Brazile has been important in shoring up Gore's support among the Democrats' traditional constituencies. She is an expert at what she calls ''smoke and mirrors,'' that is, making a candidate's support seem greater than it is. And like any good organizer -- like Whouley, who kept assuring the Des Moines workers that Shania Twain would do an event for Gore, though he had never spoken to her -- Brazile has a tendency to talk a little big to fire up the troops.

Yet in each of three visits to the Nashville headquarters, I was struck by how few Gore bumper stickers I saw in the parking lot. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of some longtime Tennessee volunteers and young staff members, I found little burning passion for Gore among his advisers. He is too familiar and too lacking in charisma, and too many of his aides have seen too many candidates. They say that he is no natural politician, for all his confidence in his own political acumen. But this is not to say his aides are not dedicated to electing him. While they may not marvel at his magnetism or vision, his advisers talk with deep respect of his decency, policy judgment and commitment to public service. If this is not the Clinton crusade of 1992, it is also not the Clinton advertising firm of 1996.

The move to Nashville, which could have been a disaster, has produced a leaner, more spirited team. Junior staff members go out for beers with one another at night, rather than with college pals in Washington. Without other familiar distractions, they come into the office on weekends and go to work. This group will build up a lot more passion if the race becomes a contest between Gore and Bush, rather than two centrist Democrats whose dislike for each other has concealed how little difference there is between them politically.

Because this is a campaign that wears its underwear on the outside, the reorganization became, perforce, part of its message. For months, Gore advisers believe, all voters had heard about the vice president was that his campaign was a mess. The man who had staked his reputation on ''reinventing government'' had pulled out a clean sheet of paper and created a bloated bureaucracy. So the campaign's turnaround had to become part of Gore's story, and the campaign encouraged numerous articles about the new headquarters and profiles of Brazile in a bid also to lend some pizazz to Gore's image. For comparison's sake, ask yourself how many profiles of Bradley's campaign manager you have read. Her name is Gina Glantz.

Despite that necessary distraction, Gore began this fall to bring his own message into focus at last, with the help of primarily two men: Carter Eskew and Bill Bradley.

Top advisers to Gore, past and present, insist that they always knew that Bradley would emerge as a serious challenger. Last spring, internal memos raised the question whether the campaign should start publicly drawing comparisons with him. But Gore's strategists concluded that to talk about Bradley would be to elevate him. The guiding, poll-driven premise was that if Gore drew within 10 points of Bush, the Bradley challenge would disappear. And the campaign had set itself the laudable goal, laughable now, of remaining positive throughout the primaries.

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Casting Gore as the inevitable nominee had worked at first. It had helped persuade potential candidates who seemed far more dangerous, like Dick Gephardt, to stay off the stage. ''But there's a difference between putting out a sense of inevitability and acting as if you're inevitable,'' one Gore adviser said. ''The fundamental operating theory of the campaign in the early days was that Bill Bradley is only a nuisance; the real issue is George Bush. The primary is about setting ourselves up for the general election.''

Gore ran as an incumbent, much the way he and Bill Clinton ran in 1996. That style fit the strategy of the campaign, and it also fit the culture of the vice president's office, which was as accustomed to elaborately staged events cooked up by expensive advance-staff members as it was to the restrictions of the Secret Service and the easy life on Air Force Two. So, despite the pleas of his New Hampshire organization, Gore tended to give high-profile speeches rather than chat in crammed living rooms. These days, Gore thinks back on that period, with a shudder, as when he was running as a vice president who wanted a promotion.

It was obvious to Gore and his staff that he was not reaching voters, particularly outside of Iowa. Some of his advisers thought that the vice president had never recovered his confidence as a speaker since he was swamped by the campaign-finance scandal two years ago. On the stump this summer, he seemed to be groping, at times shouting out his speeches, and then at others delivering them like an automaton.

In early July, at Gore's urging, Coelho brought in Eskew, a 45-year-old consultant. The move revealed how anxious the campaign had already become, because there were several reasons not to make it: Eskew had helped to create ad campaigns for the tobacco companies, a role that would expose Gore to charges of hypocrisy; he would intensify the view of the campaign as overstocked with high-priced consultants; and he was not on speaking terms with another of Gore's media advisers, Robert Squier, who left the campaign shortly thereafter.

Gore and Coelho believed Eskew's benefits outweighed his baggage. With surprising unanimity, Eskew, a sapient fellow with the air of an assistant English professor, is seen as perhaps the best Democratic adman in the business. He has a reputation for creatively puncturing opponents' images; one famously devastating Eskew campaign, on behalf of Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, used cartoons to portray Lowell P. Weicker Jr., then a U.S. senator, as a lazy bear snoozing through important votes.

Eskew shares Gore's Ivy League credentials, an important consideration for the vice president when it comes to advisers. He also has an ironic detachment from the very politicking he engages in, which nicely suits the vice president's sharper contempt for the business and for political operatives as a class. Most important, Eskew has known Gore since the two men worked as reporters for The Nashville Tennessean in the early 70's, he has worked on almost all his campaigns and he is deeply loyal to Gore. He is one of very few men, Gore's associates say, whom the vice president talks to like an equal over a drink.

At times, Eskew can seem abstracted. ''I really should pay more attention to these details,'' he mused almost to himself this fall when a reporter pointed out that in one advertisement Gore had his sleeves rolled up but his tie knotted against his throat. Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary, says, ''He's as good as anybody I've ever come across in understanding how to communicate with people, but often a conversation with him is quite disjointed.''

Coelho, who regards Eskew as brilliant, put him in complete control of the message team, which includes Bob Shrum, the veteran Democratic speechwriter and adman, and Bill Knapp, a wisecracking native New Yorker and partner of Squier's who helped elect Clinton in 1996. Coelho's idea was to get Gore to stop worrying so much about the details of his campaign, like his schedule, and to spend his time honing his message with Eskew. Now the two men talk several times daily, sometimes several times hourly.

It has been widely reported that Karenna Gore Schiff and Naomi Wolf, the writer and Gore consultant, had urged the vice president to distance himself from the president. This is true. But it understates the sway that this theory already held, and holds, among his staff members, including Eskew. It is campaign orthodoxy. This has led the campaign to play down Gore's impressive work in the Clinton administration.

''It's not what matters so much in this election,'' Karenna Gore Schiff said of the last seven years. ''What matters is who the candidates are and what they're going to do, and my dad's experience goes pretty far back. It goes back to 1976, not 1992.''

Personally, Gore remains resentful of Clinton and angry at him for enmeshing him in his scandals, his associates say. But his efforts to distance himself are driven more by a political calculation that voters still see him as Clinton's yes man, rather than as a leader -- in fact, a ''fighter'' -- in his own right, and theirs.

At times, the personal and the political have been hard to separate. Gore moved up the announcement of his candidacy to mid-June in the belief that otherwise voters would continue to see him only as the vice president. But then he stepped on his own message by criticizing Clinton in an interview taped in advance. Similarly, he enraged many Clinton loyalists in October, in his first debate with Bradley, by seizing on a vague question about politics to criticize Clinton.

Once a week, usually on Tuesdays, Coelho still conducts a conference call with John D. Podesta, the chief of staff, and other White House aides. But lower-level aides say they are no longer being pressed to consider Gore's campaign needs as they plan White House events. The White House these days is divided into two camps. ''I'm like, 'You guys, how much do you expect us to take?''' one White House aide told me this fall, after the Gore team had requested that the vice president, rather than Clinton, handle a particular announcement. Gore had just slammed Clinton in his first debate with Bradley. ''They're complaining that we want to be quoted in a story that has something to do with us,'' this aide fumed.

Clinton aides, accustomed to a politician able to knife an opponent and hug him in the same paragraph, regard Gore now with a kind of wounded condescension. They understand his need to establish his independence, but they roll their eyes over the clumsy way he does it, wondering why he does not make more of the administration's successes. The word one most often hears from them in summing up his political approach is ''sledgehammer.''

Gore and Clinton still talk by telephone two or three times a week. But when I asked Gore if he had ever consulted Clinton about the campaign, he immediately said no. ''He's a skilled politician,'' Gore said, ''and from time to time in our conversations he will offer some advice.'' There are two possibilities here: either Gore is fibbing, in which case he still feels obliged to exaggerate his personal distance from Clinton, or in fact the gap is quite significant, and despite the galaxy of advisers he has consulted, he chooses to overlook the Democrat who knows best how to run both as a challenger and as an incumbent.

For his part, Clinton misses Gore's advice, presidential aides say. Gore was able to use sarcasm to puncture Clinton's self-pitying or bombastic moods, and Clinton trusted him to tell the whole truth. ''He looks at the rest of us,'' one Clinton aide said of his boss, ''and he thinks: 'Is he telling me everything? Are they manipulating me?'''

Gore's advisers believe that the vice president had to separate himself from Clinton because he is, in the campaign's formulation, ''famous but unknown.'' The campaign found, for example, that most voters did not know that Gore had ever been anything but a politician. Eskew went to work with Gore sharpening his biography and weaving it into his standard stump speech. They zeroed in on dramatic points in Gore's own life and also the lives of his parents.

Gore had spoken about all these matters, intermittently and sometimes movingly, for years. Now he was joining them in a tight triad of parables that would give a narrative edge to his standard stump speech and to the populist theme that Eskew emphasized to define Gore's career: that he was a fighter against special interests, as one senior Gore strategist put it, ''representing the people against them.''

Throughout the summer, Gore lacked what has always been a crucial element in his political campaigns: something to run against. Any politician would suffer when compared with an abstract standard; any campaign lacks focus when it lacks an immediate objective. Gore in particular is most engaged when he is on the attack, a fact that puzzles and saddens even some of his most loyal associates. But for most of the summer Bush remained a phantom, his popularity surging while his specific plans remained unknown. Bradley was unmentionable. Then came the Boston Globe poll.

On Sept. 25, during a speech to the Democratic National Committee in Washington, Gore unveiled a new approach, leaving the lectern and its vice-presidential seal to stroll before the crowd as he described his disillusionment over Vietnam. Four days later, in announcing the move to Nashville, he mentioned Bradley by name for the first time. And less than two weeks after that, when he and Bradley appeared together before a Democratic dinner in Iowa, Gore went on the attack, labeling Bradley a quitter for walking away from politics and the party when he left the Senate. ''Stay and Fight'' read the posters the Gore campaign prepared for the evening.

As reporters gradually caught on to the game, the Gore camp confidently dismissed as inside-the-Beltway nattering any suggestions that their candidate was too negative, though they kept an eye on their internal polls. Primary voters, they said, wanted to hear about differences. The ''Stay and Fight'' theme, they believed, bolstered the campaign's preferred image of Gore while playing to a gnawing doubt party loyalists held about Bradley. (The Gore camp had intended to repeat the performance at an appearance before party activists in Orlando in December, but suspended their plans when Bradley disclosed his heart trouble the day before.)

The struggle with Bradley, Gore's advisers believe, could permit Gore to erase doubts about his character and leadership ability, the usual burden of a vice president. ''The real issue here is not a lot different from the wimp factor that dogged Bush,'' one senior Gore aide said. ''We need this fight to position ourselves with voters and to show that we can fight. It gets us out from under this vice-presidential shadow.''

As Gore went on offense, Bradley made some serious mistakes: he decided not to respond in hopes of seeming above the fray and he put out an ambitious but fuzzy health care plan, which Gore began whacking like a pinata. Gore's team was terrified that the plan might lend substance to Bradley's claim to ''big ideas.'' The goal of the attacks was to neutralize health care as the core of Bradley's positive message. But as Gore advisers realized they could attack the plan both from the left (as jeopardizing Medicaid) and from the right (as eating up the surplus), they came to see the issue as a net positive for Gore.

Once the campaign moved to Nashville, Brazile began holding weekly staff meetings. On the first day in December, about 50 people, most in jeans and T-shirts and in their 20's, stopped their work in the ''pit'' -- the big, windowless room at the center of the headquarters -- and gathered to listen as she opened the meeting by asking what they had for Thanksgiving dinner. Then she turned it over to Eskew.

In turtleneck sweater, chinos and running shoes, Eskew provided an update on the campaign's message -- that is, on what was wrong with the other guy. He told the group that the campaign was making good progress in drawing a ''health care contrast'' with Bradley and was moving on to the economy. ''The issue there again is Senator Bradley's health care plan,'' he said. ''It spends the entire surplus, which puts a lot of pressure back on deficits, which in turn put a lot of pressure on interest rates, et cetera. It's an issue of I think great importance in New Hampshire, certainly.''

But he saw another opportunity, Eskew continued: Bradley had left the door open to cutting benefits or raising taxes to shore up Social Security. ''Not a good idea in any event,'' he said, ''particularly in a Democratic primary. So, I think once again he's sort of gotten dangerously close to what's known as the third rail in, certainly, Democratic politics, if not American politics.''

Even as they envy Bradley his cultlike following, Gore's top strategists are deeply contemptuous of him. They think that he has gotten a free ride from the press, compared with the beating that their boss has taken, and that his support remains confined to elite Northeasterners. They believe he is uncomfortable with issues critical to blue-collar Democrats, like holding the line on Social Security's retirement age, and they scorn Bradley's efforts to use his campaign to highlight issues like race that do not already preoccupy most voters. They believe most Democratic voters care about health care, education and the economy, and in each of those areas, Gore's polling shows that he has an advantage among Democrats.

This conclusion can yield a dismayingly reductive approach to the possibilities of modern presidential politics, one that exchanges the roles of leader and led. ''We used to say, in the late 80's, if you don't like the issues terrain, change it,'' one Gore strategist said. ''In the late 90's, you can't do it. Voters don't have the patience and, frankly, they don't have the attention span. You have to talk about them.'' If Bradley wants to talk about race, he shrugged, ''Fine.''

I saw the new Gore in early November, in Des Moines, and fittingly, the subject that brought him out was the change in his campaign style. Gore used a question about that tired subject to poke fun at political posturing, showing a side of himself that reporters were accustomed to seeing only off the record. At an impromptu news conference, Cragg Hines, the erudite Washington bureau chief of The Houston Chronicle, asked Gore when he had the ''Damascene'' moment that led to his campaign conversion.

Gore did not hesitate. ''It was an epiphany,'' he began at his most deadly earnest, ''that occurred in the midst of an interview with The Houston Chronicle. The questions were so penetrating; they included words that I didn't know. And when I looked them up, I thought, I gotta change my campaign.''

By then, Gore was regularly holding town-hall meetings -- open meetings, as he prefers to call them, from his days as a congressional candidate -- in New Hampshire and Iowa. His answers could be overlong; his smile blinked off and on as needed, like high beams; and he had a tendency to turn his head from the waist. He had a bit of the attitude of the schoolboy with a hand perpetually raised, as he paraded his knowledge of airline deregulation, Social Security financing or breakaway Soviet republics. But in a transparently political gesture, he would stay for hours, until the last question was asked. He wasn't fighting it. In fact, he was enjoying himself.

And it worked for him. Steve Hildebrand, Gore's Iowa campaign manager, worried that the town halls burned up too much of the candidate's time, the most precious resource as the caucuses approached. Why spend three hours with 200 undecided voters when you could do an event with 450 people in 70 minutes? Then one night in December he drove to Iowa City for a follow-up look at the undecided voters who had been at a town hall. The ''conversion'' rate was incredible: 80 percent of the uncommitted voters who heard him had switched to Gore.

Yet television audiences have not been as impressed, and this may be one of the reasons why he continues to lag as many as 10 points behind George W. Bush nationally. Somehow, for all his credentials and experience, Gore comes off seeming like less than the sum of his parts. In debate, the vice president has been reluctant to take risks; when he has, the result has been damaging, as when he foolishly declared that in appointing Joint Chiefs of Staff he would make support for gays in the military a litmus test. That comment yielded yet another ''hastily assembled press conference,'' as reporters invariably call them, which is something of a Gore signature. Often, Gore seems to be trying too hard. Discussing affirmative action in a town-hall-style debate in Manchester in mid-December, Gore made a telling point, observing that the host had evidently failed to invite many blacks. But then he went too far: ''Are there any?'' he asked, looking around and starting to point. ''There's one -- one in -- in back there.''

Though he has grown more comfortable with each debate, Gore still tends to fall back on catapulting jagged speech chunks through the air. His performances recall his 1996 debate with Jack Kemp, when in his answers he repeatedly chanted a mantra (''Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment'') as though the television audience were being sleep-taught. After that debate, my grandmother, a believer in Clinton and Gore, left a pained message on my answering machine: ''Does he think I am stupid?'' This year, ''I want to fight for you'' is proving to be the patronizing mantra.

Gore knows better. ''These techniques inevitably encourage inauthenticity in a politician's message,'' he wrote of the dangers of sound bites, polling and ''personality skills'' in his 1992 best seller, ''Earth in the Balance.'' ''Why present genuine ideas and true character if artificial ones are more effective in the marketplace of power.'' When I read some of Gore's words back to him, he told me that he was no longer so concerned about political manipulation, because the audience has grown as sophisticated as the candidates and their consultants. ''And what has resulted is that only one thing really works, and that is what's real,'' he said. ''There may be people who are skilled enough and smart enough to use these personality tools to shape their image and affect and appear to be something they're not. I'm not one of them.'' Exactly so. But what is real still needs politics to be expressed.

Gore's attempts to reach TV audiences often reek of the greasepaint he rightly scorns. As he picks at Bradley, he looks political, and that may hurt his chances with the independents and moderates who, paradoxically, are the very people who are most likely to share his disdain for politics. They might be more impressed if he showed the side of himself that privately deflects operatives' suggestions with the arch question, ''Isn't that awfully political?''

One test of Gore's character will be whether he tries to create his own ''issues terrain'' after all. Those who talk about authenticity are clearly right that voters demand a sense for what a candidate truly believes; political skills -- a feel for who the voters are and an ability to reach them -- result in unalloyed pandering if a politician does not use those skills to guide the country in the direction he believes it should go. At some point, Gore will start making the environment an issue, and the question will be whether he uses it just to flesh out his biography or to build public support for the aggressive policies he claims to favor. Gore was disappointed in himself after his failed 1988 bid for the presidency in part because of how he ran. His pollsters told him that voters did not care much about the environment, and he came to play it down. In this race, Gore has talked about the environment when asked, but he has not made it a priority. His strategists argue that it is not a point of distinction with Bradley. They say that it will become a bigger issue in the general election campaign, because Bush's environmental record is weak.

When I asked Gore if there was any issue that wasn't on voters' minds that he intended to raise, he answered without a moment's pause: global warming. Then, rather disappointingly, he argued that in fact the issue is already on voters' minds. ''I think people now feel it in their own lives, and I think they're worried about it, and they should be worried about it.''

Bradley so far has bested Gore largely on style points. His ease in public, his seeming candor and his apparent disregard for old-school maneuvering have managed to make Gore seem simultaneously clumsy and slick. Gore may lack a common touch or patrician grace, yet he has learned, in meeting with voters away from the television cameras, that he can make a style of substance. In that setting, he communicates without contempt for the process or the people who take it seriously, as they should. He has to learn to take that skill on the air. He will need it in the downtime between the primaries and the Democratic convention, should he get that far. He will need it in the general election; and he will need it to govern. Before Gore can hope to seem like less of a politician, he will have to become more of one.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2000, on Page 6006025 of the National edition with the headline: Al Gore Moves Beyond Meta. Today's Paper|Subscribe